A pragmatic account of the processing of negative sentences

Abstract

Previous work suggests that negative sentences are more difficult to process than positive sentences.A supportive context, however, can mitigate this effect.We investigate the role of context on negation by measuring the processing cost of negation with and without a visual context (Study 1) and then systematically varying the strength of the context (Study 2).We find that a supportive visual context has a graded effect on negation processing.We then create a model to compute the informativeness of an utterance in context, and find that a model that considers both the surprisal of an utterance and the surprisal of seeing a referent is highly correlated with reaction times.Our data suggest that pragmatic factors likely explain the processing costs of negation.